fear, greed, and the hierarchy of whores

the governor of indiana has called members of public sector unions a "priviliged elite" and said that the time when they needed protection from and reform of the system of goverment employment (read patronage...and then tell me that that no longer exists...bearing in mind at all times that i live in lake county indiana)...this is patent nonsense as the current neo-con/tea party/ social darwinist push to cripple unions attests...but mitch is contemplating a move up in the hierarchy of whores to the position of mouthpiece-in-chief and so needs to test the political winds and hone his ideological cant...dissembling and distorting reality to bend it to the needs of political expediency is a skill that needs constant practice and a fine feel for the pulse of public opinion...dr. goebbles understood this, and though he was inclined to an extremist viewpoint, the basics of the system he created are in wide use to this day...when he said "you cannot have good government without good propaganda" he set the tone for the post-war generation of politicians across the globe...as orwell pointed out the purpose of political argot is to give impression of substance to "pure wind" and this is substantially what we are dealing with here...dispite the pronouncements of the preening, narcissitic punditry, the reassurances of the captains of industry, and the best effort of politicians to protect their phony jobs everywhere the public perceives that the economy is still in the toilet...home values are continue to sink like a stone...the price of a barrel of oil will climb as high as specualtors can make it go ( and this, in turn, is going to play hell with the cost of food [and everything else, for that matter] which is what the current round of unrest in the middle-east is about...few lybians probably really hate moe...they just cannot feed their families and that makes even the most hard-bitten, long suffering pessimist a bit testy...people can put up with alot as long as they can eat...threaten them on that fundamental an issue and you will be flattened...just wait til the water wars start in earnest...forget oil as a geopolitical motivator) and no-one has a clue about how to stop the bleeding...fear of loss of economic privilige and all the goodies it brings is what's motivating wealth to look for reasons why and whom to blame for their uncertainties ( that their own greed and exceptionalism constitute their major problems is lost on them...denial is a powerful force in human rationalizations)...somebody has to be blamed and unions seem to be the current target...when they are castrated and it does not resolve the problems another scapegoat will be found...that will do little good either...resource depletion, greenhouse gases, climate change, spiraling food costs, political unstability...none of this is caused by unions, period. the isues are in the way we have done (and continue to do, dispite the obvious indications that it is no longer workable) business for the last two hundred and fifty years and the way we have disposed of a one-time bonanza of cheap and efficient energy that we will not see again...that is an objective fact that all the scapegoating you can stand will not obviate...times call for a fundamntal change in the way we address our realtionships with the ecosystems we are a part of and that means some people will lose the positions of wealth and power they now hold and that frightens them...they will distort information and morph into fascists to hold on...but it will not create one more barrel of oil or one more dollar of profit to do so...in the end they will have to become more local and eco -friendly ( in real terms, not the "green" of the marketers) and give up some of what they have extorted from nature and from the rest of us...obviously it will not be an easy transition for some...